1. Field of the Invention
The present invention pertains to a method and apparatus for transferring structured data using a self-generating node network such that the structure of the data is preserved. More specifically, the invention is a process that maps structured data information to and from an unstructured file by building a network of nodes, each of the nodes having specialized functions and capabilities including the capability to build further nodes in the network or to store and manipulate data.
2. Description of the Related Art
As the amount of data stored by computers increases, increasingly complex data structures have been created to contain that data and to organize the data in meaningful ways. For example, in the message communication field, structured data may be provided to represent a multimedia message which is addressed to multiple recipients. Multimedia messages include audio, image, text, binary and other types of component documents mixed together in a single message. Accordingly, a data structure to store multimedia messages may include, for example, an address structure and a document structure. The address structure may, in turn, contain recipient structure which, for each recipient, may include name, address and telephone access numbers. Likewise, the document structure may, in turn, contain message component structure which, for each message component, may include message component type and message contents.
Examples of structured data may be found in virtually any field, for example, in the business field (structured data storing corporate organization and employee data), banking (structured data correlating branch office information with banking accounts), brokerage (structured data which organizes security holdings), and so on.
As data structures become more complex, it is more and more difficult to transfer the data in the data structure such that the structure is preserved. For example, a bit-for-bit transfer of an exact image of the structured data will preserve the structure only if the recipient of the image knows how the data is stored and how to reconstruct that structure. Structure will not be preserved if the recipient does not know how to recreate the structure from the image, for example, which bits represent structure and which bits represent data. Accordingly, it has not heretofore been possible to transfer structured data such that the structure of the data is preserved unless both the sender and the recipient have pre-agreed on the format by which the data will be transferred.